Few things
clarify the absurdity of partisan politics more than presidential elections;
with their mud-slinging platitudes and vague assurances of a better tomorrow,
red and blue would-be presidents present a continual tableau of the very worst
of our politics and ourselves. We vote for them in the way we cheer for
our favorite sports teams, paying more attention to the execution of their
strategies than to the ultimate purpose of the game. But Bruce Fein and Ralph
Nader, who visited Harvard Law School on February 8th and spoke to a
packed audience in Austin Hall, silently provided a blueprint for a new kind of
politics, one transcending partisan rancor in order to conquer the truly
exigent problems of the day.

I say
silently even though they lectured passionately and well. Fein went first, and
began his talk with the same quotation from Tacitus with which he opens chapter
one of his book Constitutional Peril:
"The worst crimes were dared by few, willed by more, and tolerated by all."
Fein then went on to discuss the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American
purposefully obliterated by a United States drone strike without so much as an
official indictment, much less a trial. Fein describes the utter lack of
due-process in al-Awlaki's death, and the way in which the government and media
subsequently ignored the killing of al-Awlaki's sixteen year old son three weeks later. Fein described the myriad ways in which, after 9/11, our most basic
civil liberties have been eroded, how congress has acquiesced in its most
fundamental duties (including the duty to be the institution that declares
war), and how the threat of impeachment, which loomed as a fundamental check on
presidential power even half a generation ago, has all-but disappeared, even as
the crimes of the executive have become steadily more obvious and
egregious. What began under Bush continued under Obama: Fein felt no need
to pit red vs. blue, for the destruction of civil liberties had become a
decidedly purple bruise on our union.

Ralph
Nader also discussed the erosion of Americans' basic freedoms, focusing his ire
on the way in which deaths linked to corporate greed are greeted with a shrug,
while those caused by terrorist thugs are met with the greatest
overreaction-and what he categorized as the greatest war-crime in the form of
the Iraq war-in American history. We shrug when we consider that an estimated
fifty thousand people a year die because of workplace trauma, or that
forty-five thousand meet their maker too soon because they go without health
insurance. But faced with three thousand deaths to terrorism? That, it
seems, warrants two wars, a domestic spying program, assassination of American
citizens and now, with the National Defense Authorization Act, the indefinite
detention of Americans on the President's say-so.

But one
thing went basically un-acknowledged in Fein and Nader's two talks and the
discussion that followed. Nobody mentioned that Bruce Fein carries political
views of the "far-right", and Nader of the "far-left." Fein admits in his book
that he "applauded President Bush's appointments of...Roberts and ...Alito" and
that he believes that "the Supreme Court's abortion decree in Roe v. Wade
(1973) and invention of a right to homosexual sodomy in Lawrence v Texas
(2003) created wretched constitutional law." Nobody mentioned that Ralph Nader
was the presidential nominee of the Green Party, and a man who called the Bush
administration's tax policies "Alice in Wonderland economics." What Nader and
Fein demonstrated by their presence and their passion was that the problems our
constitutional democracy faces are far more dire than those that lend
themselves easily to the red vs. blue, Democrat vs. Republican discourse. The
fight for freedom in our country against the odious and scandalous degradations
to which we have grown accustomed knows no color or party.